Research Project: Levee Erosion Simulation

Motivation:

The New Orleans area levee failures during Hurricane Katrina drew
media attention to an important problem in Civil Engineering. The
emphasis of our work is on earthen levees, dams, and embankments. A
major cause of failures of such structures is overtopping, which
causes erosion to the point of breaching the crest. Our research
focuses on simulating the initial small-scale features of erosion and
the formation of rills and gullies on the embankment. We wish to study
and eventually be able to simulate the way earthen embankments erode,
with respect to the formation of these rills and gullies. Validation
of computer simulations is the primary focus of our research. We will
utilize RPI's geotechnical centrifuge to perform high-g erosion
experiments on small-scale models to predict and validate the model
for full scale simulations.

Description:

This project is an interdisciplinary work, a collaborative effort
between the Civil Engineering and Computer Science departments. It is
based on the idea of providing validation for computer simulation
through laboratory experiments. Hopefully, our results will be useful
to civil engineers when designing earthen embankment structures.

Goals:

Study small scale erosion on earthen embankments, such as levees and dams.

Design a new data structure to terrain representation that is easily coupled with an erosion simulation.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science
Foundation under Grant No. CMMI 0835762. Any opinions, findings, and
conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of
the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National
Science Foundation.